...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

There is always room for at least two truths.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.